EXIT Theatre Wins BATCC Award for 30 Years of Bay Area Theatre

On May 6, EXIT Theatre received yet another award, this one from the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. At their Gala awards ceremony, BATCC honored the blood, toil, tears and sweat behind EXIT - Artistic Director Christina Augello and Managing Director Richard Livingston - with the Paine Knickerbocker Award "for continuing contribution to Bay Area theatre."

Mark Jackson...Lunatique Fantastique ... Banana, Bag & Bodice...Jason Craig...RIPE Theatre...Mugwumpin...Sean Owens...Christian Cagigal...The Olympians Festival, to name a few, either got their start or received a huge boost from their time spent at the EXIT The San Francisco Fringe Festival, now in its 22nd year and the second-oldest Fringe Festival in the US, started here. In addition, DIVAfest, the proving ground dedicated to women artists, is now in its 12th year at EXIT.

EXIT Theatre was founded on Eddy Street in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood in 1983 when a group of method actors and retired vaudevillians came together under artistic director Christina Augello to perform a new play in the lobby of a residential hotel and passed the hat for funding. The local alternative press has named EXIT Theatre "Best Local Venue", "Best (3,000 miles) Off-Broadway Theater", "Best Off-Beat Theatre" and the artistic director has been named "Best Producer" and "Working Woman of the Year."

EXIT can attribute its success to staying true to its mission: to develop theater artists by providing opportunities to perform, develop, and experiment. EXIT commissions, develops and produces new plays; provides production support and low cost theater rentals to small companies, and hosts theaters and playwrights-in-residence.

Currently, EXIT Theatre operates five storefront theaters, with a total of 300 seats, in the Tenderloin district of downtown San Francisco. These range in size from 25 seats to 80 seats and annually host 100 independent theater companies.

The San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and acknowledging achievement in theatres of all types and sizes in the Bay Area by recognizing excellence and outstanding achievement in the various fields of theatre artistry.

Active since 1976, the Circle consists of reviewers in all nine Bay Area counties, across various media, who are voted into membership by existing members based on the quality and consistency of their reviews. The Circle hosts an annual awards ceremony each spring to celebrate superior work in the previous year.

EXIT Theatre, EXIT Stage Left, EXIT Studio, EXIT Café, all at 156 Eddy Street, San Francisco 94102. Two blocks from Powell Street BART Station. For more information, call (415) 931-1094 or visit www.theexit.org.

Pictured: You're Going to Bleed by Melissa Fall is one of the shows at the 12th Annual DIVAfest, currently running at EXIT Theatre. Photo by Claire Rice.

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